You have a trio with Ezra, Magic In The Other. You had a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund a record. Where does all that stand?

Ezra is from the East Coast. He went to school in Vermont, then he came out west, planted roots and has become part of this Bay Area music scene. He’s been playing with Phil Lesh, a bunch at Terrapin Crossroads and around the bay. He’s been in some different projects. Ezra played with Sean Hayes for a bit, so he’s done sort of singer-songwriter stuff, he’s done some world music stuff, he played with this Iranian musician for a while and toured New York with him.

He’s studied a lot of music but he’s always sort of been a side-man. He’s never been like in a band where he has a voice and his opinion counts. He even wrote this song “A Man Without A Band” that he would play at Terrapin Crossroads. So I think it finally came to a point with where he was like, “You know what, I just need to make a band. I need to stop talking about it and start a band.” The first two calls he put out were to me and to Roger [Riedlbauer] because he thought we’d be a good combination. Roger is a killer guitar player, lives in Oakland and he’s more in the jazz world than the Dead world. Both of those worlds exist in the Bay Area, but sometimes they don’t collide as much as you might think. He’s sort of like Bill Frisell with a punk-jazz, avant-garde approach.

I’d never met Roger, but I was like, “Sure! Let’s get together and see how it feels.” And when we did, our personalities just clicked and the three way energy was really good and it all felt balanced. Ezra had all these compositions written on paper. It was literally like reading scores of music off the page and putting the music together, which is something I don’t typically do with a rock band but, it was really cool. It took me back to college a little bit with studying scores.

So that’s kind of how it started and he didn’t even really have a name, but he said he’d been thinking about a name. After a couple of rehearsals he sort of sprung the band name on us and we are like, “Yeah! That’s awesome.” He explained it as he wanted this project to be something that would tap into the body, the mind, the soul and then this like other element that like would happen only when we would come together to play with an audience and that would be the magic. It would be this thing that you can’t plan for or rehearse for, but we want an element of that unknown magic. And so that’s sort of been the direction for us—trying to tap into this some headiness, some danciness, some spiritual soulfulness, and then whatever magic that happens because of all that.

We had our first rehearsals and then Ezra just booked a gig. He was like, “Let’s put a gig on the book. That’ll force our rehearsals to be more focused.” So we booked a gig and then by the fall, we decided to book a residency at this place in Berkeley, the Ivy Room. We played there every other Wednesday and we’d invite different people to open for us or we’d open for them if they were bigger. And that got us even more comfortable as a band and we started feeling like the band was taking shape and like there was people coming regularly.

So by the fall we were trying to figure out the band and we were like, “Let’s force another move and look at making a record.” We had some contacts at this killer studio in San Francisco called Tiny Telephone, which is all analog—we were convinced that it was going to be actually a cool approach for us and it has been. We are about 80% through it, but in the fall we launched this Kickstarter to help raise the money and we had this $18,000 goal. After week one we were like, “Oh crap, I hope that wasn’t too ambitious.” But it really picked up and we hit almost 20. So, it was super successful and we were really appreciative of all the support.

So we started recording in December and we have a couple more sessions on the books for tracking and mixing and hoping to have something out this summer or fall the latest. We raised enough money to do the recording and manufacture it and even get some merchandise pieces that were offered through the Kickstarter campaign.

After that comes out do you think you’re make it our way, out East?

We would love to hit the East Coast. Ezra is super pumped and motivated. It’ll be a balancing act of getting to the East Coast and making it affordable and seeing what kind of touring we can do. We hope to play some festivals this summer. We’re completely self-managed and self-booked and self-published. It’s the three of us, solely. We’re all chipping in however we can but we’re excited and we’ll see where this takes us.

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